Sophism

Sophism refers to the teaching tradition of the sophists, itinerant professional educators active in fifth-century BCE Greece, most prominently Protagoras and Gorgias, who traveled from city to city instructing paying students, chiefly ambitious young men, in rhetoric, argumentation and practical success in public and political life rather than in the pursuit of timeless metaphysical truth for its own sake. Protagoras is remembered for the relativist claim that "man is the measure of all things," suggesting that truth and value are relative to the perceiving individual or community rather than fixed and universal, while Gorgias pushed skeptical argument further still, contending that nothing exists, that if anything did exist it could not be known, and that if it could be known it could not be communicated. Because the sophists taught the technique of arguing either side of a question persuasively, often for a fee, they acquired among their philosophical rivals, above all Plato, a lasting reputation for prizing rhetorical victory over genuine truth, an association that gave the very word "sophistry" its enduring negative connotation of clever but specious reasoning. Modern scholarship has substantially rehabilitated the sophists as serious contributors to Greek thought on language, ethics, law and the relativity of custom (nomos) to nature (physis), recognizing their influence on the development of Greek rhetoric, democratic political culture and later skeptical and relativist philosophy even as Socratic and Platonic philosophy defined itself partly in opposition to them.